Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a first-person game set in an open world. Your mission is to escape from the archipelago on which you have been stranded. That means surviving being hunted, looting abandoned buildings, and collecting up scattered fragments of a mysterious machine which should enable you to get home.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted includes:

Procedural tools to generate, save, and explore your own landscapes.

Open-ended gameplay: choose how you want to play. Complete the game non-lethally, or use whatever you can find to bring down the tweedbot menace.

A Thief-style visibility-meter combined with our own foliage-based stealth system.

Unique generative soundtrack.

A disembodied sinister butler!

Pubs!

No DRM!

Varied loot including weapons, traps, booze, marmalade, tea, something that may or may not be bacon, and a dead rabbit.

Fires to cook that rabbit on. (And other things besides!)

Mac, Windows and Linux versions.

Strange lore and pipe-smoking moustache-wearing mechanical locals.

Please note that all of what we've listed here is already present in our prototype, but much of it is currently in a early, undeveloped state. Kickstarter will help us deliver the game with final, professional art. It already looks pretty good, but we want it to look and sound breath-taking.

Hunters stalk the player through crop fields.

What Will Kickstarter Money Do?

The target we're aiming for here is going to allow us to complete the task that we've already put so much time and effort into. We've invested so much in the prototype, as you can see in these screenshots and videos, but they nevertheless contain lots of placeholder material - particularly in animation and audio - and now we need your help to make that into a full-fledged game.

We don't have a full time artist, so Kickstarter money will be vital to helping us commission the art and animation we need to fill the game up with exciting assets: new biomes to explore, new buildings to explore, more robots to flee from and do battle against, more strange things to collect up and pack your inventory with. Most importantly, we need money to tweak the systems that will bring this project to life: the robots themselves.

The robots need quality animations, and lots of them, which does not come cheap. They also need better-developed AI, which is all about giving our two programmers more time with their tools. Furnishing our robots with intelligence and personality is no simple task, and we need time and money to get on with it. This project is about us making the kind of game we want to play, and as experienced and dedicated gamers, we know that this is the kind of game many of you will want to play, too. It's an open-ended experience which you'll decide the pace and direction of as you play.

The better we do here on Kickstarter, the deeper that experience will become in the finished game.

Shotguns get a fair bit of use.

But Who Are You Guys?

Big Robot consists of two full-time team members, two part-time team members, and a small supporting cast of artists. We've already produced two games: generative music sequencer puzzle game AVSEQ, which you can find on Steam, and Fallen City, a BIMA-award nominated educational game about the value of cities which was commissioned by Channel 4. You can find that freely available on the C4 website.

Jim Rossignol initially founded Big Robot to produce the Channel 4-commissioned educational game, Fallen City, and then went on to focus on projects based on generative and procedural design, thanks to his creative work with Tom Betts. Jim is a veteran games journalist and author of the book This Gaming Life, which was published by the University Of Michigan in 2008. Many of you will already be familiar with him from his day job at the PC-gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun, or from his time writing for outlets such as PC Gamer or Wired magazine. Jim is the creative lead on Sir, You Are Being Hunted, and is responsible for the overall direction of the project.

James Carey is our lead designer and production co-ordinator. You may know him from his work on Bohemia Interative's Arma II, his time at Total War devs, The Creative Assembly, or from our own previous games Fallen Cityand AVSEQ. James has a hand in all aspects of the game, and is particularly interested in simulationist approaches to design.

The man behind the majority of the maths involved is Tom Betts, a veteran programmer with a keen interest in generative and procedural systems. Tom designed and wrote our generative music puzzle game AVSEQ, and has been working on digital installations and in videogame academia for many years. Tom's work is what powers our procedural world generation, and he has also created a generative music system which will be furnished by audio from digital artist Andy Holbrook.

Dan Puzey, who has been our consultant programmer, helping with all aspect of the project, is a lead architect for a major commercial software company. We've been enormously lucky to have him working with us in his spare time.

Our art needs have been met by a small team of talented freelancers. Talented indie devs Frogames' lead artist Christophe Canon has helped produce 3D models and textures, while Martin Davies (PC Gamer contributor and talented illustrator) has produced our beautiful hand-drawn 2D art and UI elements. Sir, You Are Being Hunted is being made in Unity Pro, with our own procedural terrain engine, the British Countryside Generator.

Bleak British landscapes are generated automagically.

What About Stretch Goals?

This Kickstarter is about enabling the Big Robot team to bring home the brilliant concept we've already put so much time and effort into. £40,000 is the amount we think we need to do that. But if we exceed that total, we will of course be able to add more content: buildings, loot, and NPCs. We'll announce what these are when we hit our goal. Right now the focus is on delivering a brilliant single-player experience. But multiplayer is on the horizon, and depending on how the Kickstarter goes, we have a plan for tackling the co-op/competitive multiplayer aspect of the game.

Stretch goals are additional features that we can promise if we hit higher levels of funding, now that the £40,000 goal has been reached. Here's what we're planning.

£45,000 - The Landowner

At this amount we'll be expanding our NPC roster with “The Landowner.” This chap is an aberrant mechanical ultra-toff. He's a leader among hunters, and the nightmare gaze of his glowing monocle means near-certain death, and at the very least lots of peril. With The Landowner in play, the player is truly in trouble – his tracking skills and his riflemanship are peerless. Fear him.

£50,000 - Hunting!

This stretch goal will allow us to include additional wildlife-slaying functionality. You will be able to hunt pheasants and rabbits and then cook them for sustenance. This will provide a complementary mode of survival for players aside from scavenging, as well as furnishing the world of Sir with more life. (And death.)

£55,000 - The Castle biome.

A completely new island type on which a ruined castle is procedurally generated across the entire island. This will provide the game with both a radically different terrain, and an atmospheric arena in which to be systematically hunted down and shot. (We're really excited about this one – more proc-gen makes Tom happy.)

Currently Playing:

crikey these kickstarters are finishing us off,aren't they supposed to pay for things,they have reached £59,000
,i quite like the idea but who knows

i hope these companies don't just run with kickstarter money,some of them have over a million dollars and stuff,seems like a cool scam if people forget and no guarantee,there was a broken swoed one too wasn't there,i mean't to give to that as i like broken sword

And next we reveal what we anticipate being the final stretch goals: the Riders, and multiplayer.

£70,000 - The Riders

Our most ambitious NPCs will take on the form of a classic British fox hunt, one of the favoured bloodsports of the rich and landed. These red-coated rider robots will be the most merciless - and the fastest - hunters in the archipelago. Once they have you sighted, well, run, Fox, run. We're asking a bit more for this thanks to the additional complexity of riding characters, and we're certain they'll make the most exciting addition to our NPC arsenal.

£80,000 - Multiplayer

It goes without saying that multiplayer is an extremely complex undertaking in its own right, and because the focus of Sir is on a single-player game, we are not going to promise multiplayer on release. We are a tiny team, and must hit one objective at time. What we will do, however, is provide a multiplayer component to all backers when this goal is unlocked, soon after the initial release of the game.

We've had plans for multiplayer for a long time, and we agree with those of you who have suggested that some manner of multiplayer suits the nature of the game. Currently we're planning a 4-player game, where the players can compete or co-operate with each other as they are hunted by the robots. Only one player can get off the island, and so winning will require getting others to sacrifice themselves, or you to sacrifice others. The choice, we hope, will be one that drives the game.

Other Things!

We're busily at work on the game, but there's more Kickstarter stuff to come, including more detail on the physical rewards, and another gameplay video showing features such as placing traps, luring AI into traps, and using the environment to your advantage.

If you'd like to join in further discussions about this stuff please head over to the forum on the main Big Robot site, where we're already knee deep in Sir char. It's also not a bad idea to follow Jim and Tom on Twitter (if you're into that sort of thing) for general development chat.